Modernização agrícola nos municípios da região do MATOPIBA: uma aplicação de análise fatorial e espacial

Abstract

Agricultural modernization can be understood as the restructuring of the technical base of the category, that is, the increasing use of raw materials and modern production methods, such as fertilizers, soil improvers, and seed improvement, as well as the intensification of the use of machinery, such as tractors, harvesters, and seeders, in order to increase the productivity of land and labor factors. This entire transformation process entails technical changes in the production system, a phase that is also characterized by a greater rationality in the enterprise and the insertion of technological innovations, which includes more sophisticated harvesting practices. In this regard, modernization leads to the industrialization of agriculture, which is related to changes in the relationship between man and nature, in the social elements of production and work tools. In Brazil, the MATOPIBA region, formed by the border municipalities of the states of Maranhão (MA), Tocantins (TO), Piauí (PI), and Bahia (BA), is identified in the literature as the last agricultural frontier in the country, resulting from the advance of agribusiness and the growth of a production model which is supported by high mechanization. Over the last years, the dynamics of land occupation in the MATOPIBA region have undergone major and rapid transformations, due to the growth of agricultural activities, with a new economic way of exploitation of the territory, based on grain cultivation. On this basis, the objective of this research is to study the process of agricultural modernization in MATOPIBA, with data collected from the Agricultural Census of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), for the year 2017. To this end, the methodologies used consist of the application of exploratory Factor Analysis (FA), Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis (ESDA), and the estimation of the SAC spatial model, having the agricultural Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as the dependent variable, and the factors obtained by FA as the independent variables. The results found have indicated the presence of seven factors, which together explain 81.84 percent of the total variance of the original data, named, respectively, intensive agricultural activity capitalization, intensive exploration of the land factor, intensive machinery and traditional agricultural implements, intensive labor-capital relationship and extension practices, intensive use of pesticides in agricultural activity, intensive technology for exploited land, and intensive capitalization with labor and infrastructure aspects. Only the intensive agricultural activity capitalization (F1), the intensive exploration of the land factor (F2), and the intensive machinery and traditional agricultural implements (F3), were statistically significant. Therefore, it is possible to conclude that the concentration of some factors in certain areas was identified and that the region, as a whole, cannot yet be considered as having highly mechanized agriculture, considering that there is no strong use of modern tools and inputs in the agricultural establishments since almost 60 percent of the municipalities were classified as having a low degree of agricultural modernization.